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The Black Box of Everyday Life
The Black Box of Everyday Life
Abstract
Ethnologists like to think of themselves as masters of the study of the everyday, but
we still know surprising little how this mundane machinery works. Everyday life remains something of a black box, our understanding is still piecemeal and fragmented.
This paper explores cohabitation and circulation of objects, affects and activities in
the homeseen as a workshop where raw materials, raw feelings, previously untried
movements and new routines are welded into everyday patterns. The concepts of
throwntogetherness, assemblage and entanglement are used to explore such transformations and co-dependencies, often naturalised into invisibility.
The home is also discussed a moral economy with strong ideas about good and bad,
duties and rights as well as a space colonized by ideals and consumer dreams, which
often can produce guilty feelings of not good enough.
Taking Turns
ne of the most striking characteristics of contemporary cultural analysis is the incessant production of new turns, but the SIEF anniversary may be a good time for a quick retrospective look. The turn
phenomenon has a history. It all began with the textual turn in the early 1970s
(Chouliaraki 2008), which advocated that cultures, bodies, and people should
be read as texts. One of the results of this was the strong impact that discourse
analysis had over several decades. But turns create counter-turns and the hegemony of discourse analysis was challenged by new turns, such as the spatial, the material, and the affective turn. Many of these argue for greater attention to non-discursive or pre-discursive dimensions of everyday life, but also
for a focus not on what people say but what they do.
So that is where we are now: twisted by a number of turns. How does this
affect the ethnologic and folkloristic study of everyday life? And what could
our contributions be to these discussions? In a sense, the focus on the material,
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the place-bound, and the emotional aspects sits well with usthey have long
formed part of our approach. Nevertheless I find the new theoretical turns
refreshing and challenging in many ways. They create cross-disciplinary dialogues, but also beg the question of how they could be combined or entangled
in productive ways. This paper deals with some approaches to such entanglements, drawing on empirical examples from a classic research arena: the home.
Looking back on the making and remaking of turns over the last decades
it is striking how different theoretical approaches have evolved. The interest
in materialities, for example, has been developed by Actor Network Theory
with its focus on the co-dependence of human and non-human actors. ANT
is a tradition that has been increasingly influential in contemporary ethnology (Ren and Petersen 2013). Another strand is found in attempts to revitalize
phenomenological traditions, as in, for example, the more down-to-earth perspectives of post-phenomenology that attempt to bring a classic philosophical
tradition closer to the study of everyday activities by developing ethnographiesby doing a concrete phenomenology of specific life-worlds, rather than
interpreting texts (Ingold 2011 and Verbeek 2009). A number of ethnologists
have contributed to this phenomenological turn by studying experiences as
situated everyday practices (see, for example, the recent studies in Frykman
and Frykman, forthcoming).
Affective theory is also helpful here, viewing affects as forces and energies
which shape the interaction between bodies. It explores the in-betweenness
not only between human actors but also between humans and objects. Affect
is about reactions and communications, which often are unconscious, driving us toward movement or thought, overwhelming or exciting usa passing
mood, a sudden sensibility, a creeping irritation or anxiety (Gregg and Seigworth 2010).
For the ethnological tradition of the cultural analysis of everyday life, I
find the development of what has been called non-representational theory especially interesting. A somewhat clumsy term, it was first developed as an
umbrella term among British cultural geographers (Thrift 2008; Anderson and
Harrison 2010). It combines several theoretical and ethnographic perspectives
and might more accurately be termed more-than-representational theory. It
focuses less on codes, representations, and discourses and more on everyday
practices and skills, as well as sensibilities and feelings (drawing as it does on
theories of materiality, performance and affect). In many ways it is grounded
in the phenomenological imperative to start the analysis with the how rather than the why of social action. It means focusing on the constant making
and remaking of everyday life. This interest does not, of course, exclude the
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symbolic and semiotic aspects of material objects; the boundaries between the
non- or pre-representational and the representational are constantly blurred.
In a sense, the most interesting part of non-representational studies is the
methodological focus: an interest in a constant experimentation with methods
to capture dimensions of actions that are hard to verbalize. As Philip Vannini
(2015, 14) puts it, researchers should try to dance a little more. This is often
done through bricolage, combining different materials and approaches, inviting dialogues with art, popular culture, and fiction. The result is a strong interweaving of theory and methodological approaches in an attempt to find new
ways of doing ethnography and often learning from approaches outside academia, such as artists experimenting with destabilising or provoking everyday
life, for example (Thrift 2008).
Maybe I am interested in non-representational studies because they strike a
familiar chord. We find similar attempts at opening up new research strategies
among European ethnologists, but in a less organized form.
If methodology can be said to be the strength of non-representational studies, the same cannot be said about most affective theories. Although they have
developed new perspectives on the study of feelings they usually do so within
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there is little attention to the fact that that homes, above all, are full of material
objects, which constantly need to be handled (Baudrillard 1998).
Intense debates on problems of excess and overflow are found in different
historical situations and they are often linked to dreams of a future rational
and simple everyday world (Czarniawska and Lfgren 2014). Domestic life
in the twenty-first century was supposed to be cyber-light and friction-free,
thanks to all the new technologies that would simplify peoples lives. Most
Western homes are, however, still veritable jungles of clumsy objects and
gadgets, utensils and tools crammed into every available space. Cupboards
and wardrobes may be bursting, cellars and attics cluttered. Little gadgets let
out green or angry red blips in the kitchen, electric cords create jungles under
the tables. People devote a large amount of energy and resources to handling
this abundance; things are shuffled back and forth, rearranged, recycled. Every day, new objects enter and old ones are lost, forgotten or wasted, leaving by
the back door.
The magic of the bowl in the window sill. Slowly, it attracts all kinds of things, bits and pieces,
transforming them into stuff. Photo: O. Lfgren.
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As Maurizia Boscagli has pointed out, this abundance means that contemporary Western homes are crowded not so much with objects but with stuff:
non-descript heaps, bundles, piles, assemblages. She defines stuff as materiality out of bounds (2014, 3). In the constant battle with too much stuff, domestic objects are continuously changing places, but they are also redefined
and charged with different affects. Taking Boscaglis perspective into different
domestic contexts, it is possible to explore some of the forms that the production of stuff takes.
Let me begin with the white ceramic bowl that someone puts on the coffee
table as a pleasing design accent. There it is, simple, beautiful, and, above all,
seductively empty. Suddenly there is an empty matchbox in it, next to a couple
of coins. The ice has been broken, and with a magic force, new objects are attracted: a cellphone charger, an old lottery ticket, an unpaid electricity bill and
some used batteries. Step by step a mountain is appearing on the table, until
one day someone gives the living room a searching look: We cant have all
this mess!
Over time, the contents of the white bowl have turned into a diffuse assemblage of stuff. Things are joined into a confederate agency, or a vibrant assemblage as June Bennett puts it. She points out that an assemblage owes its
capacity for agency to the shi effect: a Chinese term which describes something that is hard to verbalise:
the kind of potential that originates not in human initiative but instead results from the very disposition of things. Shi is the style, energy, propensity, trajectory or lan inherent to a specific arrangement of
things. (Bennett 2011, 35)
Stuff is a special category of shi, often vague, liminal and overwhelming. It is
things on the move (Boscagli 2014, 5ff).
The stuff in the white bowl is a temporary arrangement, soon exposed to
attempts to declutter and recategorize. As the bowl is emptied the home stands
out as a complex system of order, where archival rules for kitchen drawers,
wardrobes and bookcases are developed, transformed or challenged by the
members of the household. Anybody know where this thing should go?
When objects pile up, and gadgets go into hiding under sofas, coping practices of ordering, storing, and retrieving are put into action. The production
of disorder is, of course, a cultural practice, mirroring changing ideas about
order, value, and taxonomies. Differences of class, gender and generation are
at work here. French anthropologist Jean Paul Filiod (2003) has discussed what
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he calls different modalities of domestic disorder (see also Dion et al. 2014).
Some collections of stuff survive by becoming invisibledomestic driftwood
in plain sight on the top of the shelf or in the garage corner but no longer noticed. This state of affairs may survive for a long time. Other kinds of messes
turn into a constant eyesore or provoke feelings of guilt.
The author Karl Ove Knausgrd takes a look around his overflowing kitchen
and stops at the two shelves on the wall next to the window, where he notices
[S]welling coral reef-like over all the small things the kids had collected
over the last years, from sweet dispensers formed like princesses or different Disney-characters, boxes with pearls, pearl boards, glue pens, toy
cars, and water colours, to jigsaw pieces, Playmobil parts, letters and
bills, dolls and some glass bubbles with dolphins inside which Vanja
wanted to have when we were in Venice last summer. (Knausgrd 2012,
260)
He reflects on the constant battle between chaos and order that goes on in
Western homes and the ways that the material world is always about to take
over. What he describes is not a collection of discrete elements, but, rather,
a coral reef of stuff. One attempt to explore such micro-universes of stuff is
an anthropological study of thirty-two Californian homes, Life at Home in the
Twenty-First Century, in which a team of researchers made detailed ethnographies of domestic life and domestic stuff (Arnold et al. 2012). The first household assemblage they analysed had 2,260 visible possessions in the first three
rooms that were documented (two bedrooms and the living room), not counting all the stuff that was out of sight in lockers, closets, or drawers. After that,
they gave up counting. The people interviewed often complained about their
homes being a mess. There were stations in which stuff piled up, or dumping grounds as someone called them. Storage spaces developed everywhere,
often quite unplanned, like the garage, where there was no longer room for a
car, or bedroom corners and other such unused in-between spaces.
In homes like these things are always on the move, both in physical and
mental terms. Labels may change: precious heirlooms, fun memorabilia, cherished possessions, strange gadgets, forgotten stuff, non-descript paraphernalia, trash, rubbish, garbage. According to their position they may be handled
with loving care or brusque movements, evoking affects of strange haunting,
cold indifference, warming nostalgia, or acute irritationthrown into a cardboard box or put on show on a living room shelf. One and the same object may
live through many such transformations.
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haunted by her demons. She is out of work and struggles to keep her family
of five children together, not very successfully. The family is always moving to
new and worse apartments. Disorder and chaos reign:
The reality for the children is the room. This kitchen. They live as encapsulated in a periodical system. There is no one that wants to look into
their part of the world. There is nobody that wants to look outside. Everything circles around the death star in the kitchen. There is an unpleasant feeling of poverty in the kitchen; mainly because it is so aimless (or
planless?). Odd cups. Odd plates. Chipped. A sink full of dirty crockery.
Overflowing trash bags on the floor next to the sink. Resignation. How
she moves through the kitchen, touches objects, trying to create order
in a growing chaos. Nothing works... She moves objects, lifts them up,
puts them away, puts them back. (Lundberg 2013, 96)
Despair and resignation is the reigning mood in this setting, where half-hearted attempts at decluttering, broken china, smells and sounds, and unassorted
and discarded objects are welded together.
Never Good Enough
An important domestic feeling and mood setter is guilt: guilt about not having
a good enough home or family life perhaps, with a lack of control and order. In
the interviews with Californian families mentioned above, the theme of messiness occurs frequently, mainly among the wives:
This is the office. Its a total mess. We probably should, you know, organize it better And here we have the garage, with everything. It is
usually a total mess and its a total mess today again. This is where we
have bikes and all the old furniture, sofas and things we dont use. It
is, how can I say it, its a mess. Its not fun, it should be cleaned up and
we should probably get rid of a whole bunch of stuff. (Arnold 2012, 26)
Karl Ove Knausgrd talks about the stuff piling up in the apartment that could
give his wife panic-like attacks:
[I]t was the feeling of chaos it gave her, which she couldnt handle. Often she came home with storage utensils, which should sort of organize everything; different boxes for different things, a tray for my post,
one for hers, marked with our names, as she had seen at other peoples
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places who seemed to be orderly, but the systems collapsed after a few
days, and everything flowed out again as before.
Knausgrd embarks on decluttering projects himself, but has to give up. It was
as if the things were alive, as if they lay there and pulled stuff towards them
in order to grow and be powerful. He keeps reassuring himself that this was
not a moral issue:
We were not bad people, even if we were messy. It was not a sign of bad
morals. This I tried to say to myself, but it didnt help, the feelings were
too strong; when I walked around in the mess, it was as if it accused me,
accused us, we were bad parents and bad people. (2012, 262)
For over a century, wall hangings like this one from the 1940s have decorated kitchen walls. They
often depict perfect families having perfect dinnersin a striking contrast to the actual kitchen
mess with its improvised meals. Photo: O. Lfgren.
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A theme running through many of the battles with overflowing stuff is a nagging feeling of being stuck with too much of it. There is the constant dream of
a simpler or even a minimalist home, and there are many (often half-hearted)
attempts at reform, at consuming less and getting rid of more and becoming a better organized household. There is the constant barrage of images of
good or beautiful living in homestyle magazines and IKEA catalogues, or fantasies about the perfect homes of neighbours. Questions of guilt and the gap
between ideals and reality are closely tied to the constant visits of invisible
guests, those imaginary judges or censors that tell people what a perfect or
good home should look like. In an increasingly complex world of cohabitation
arrangements, the ideal of the nuclear family still stands strong. In her study
of a lesbian family, Karina Luzia (2011) shows how this ideal constantly hovers
in the background and has to be challenged.
Guilt is thus a good example of the agency of feelings that is often on an
unconscious level. Guilt may transform the home, present it in a special light,
demanding certain activities or blocking others. The power of guilt also becomes visible in attempts to fight it. In 2009, the Swedish artist Lotta Sjberg
started the Facebook project Family livingthe true story by posting pictures of
her untidy home. The aim: to create a contrast to the ideal of the perfect home
that is swamping us in newspapers, TV-shows and real estate advertisements
(Sjberg 2014, 3). In 2014 the project had 23,000 followers who contributed
photos of their untidy and at times chaotic homes as well as supportive comments. One called the site a refuge from perfection, others sent in specimens
of their hand-embroidered wall hangings with texts like life is too short to
be dustfree, not coping is a human right, and a clean kitchen is a sign
of a wasted life (to stay true to the ambition of non-perfection, some of the
embroideries were only half-finished). The many comments on the Facebook
page describe different strategies for fighting guilt or bad consciences. It has
helped me to see that I am not lazy or a bad, but good and capable, making
active choices doing what I want and not what I should, no longer living in different shoulds and musts, one contributor states. Another put it like this: I
feel part of a humorous but serious rebellion against over-consumption. Others called it a safety valve, pure therapy, or a relieving insight that there
is always someone who has a more chaotic home, or now I feel normal.
There is a battle of feelings going on in the comments.
The Entanglements of Multi-Tasking
The worries about clutter and overconsumption illustrate a general trend.
Over recent decades, homes have become more open and boundaries between
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activities and rooms more fluid. This is not only the result of open-space planning and doing away with doors and walls or opening up the kitchen to other
areas. In older homes, activities and people also mingle in new patterns (which
also results in a new longing for privacy and a yearning to close the door behind you).
What is a living room? asked the participants in Lotta Sjbergs Facebook
project. Here are some suggestions from the long list:
A playroom, a drying-the-washing-room, a storage space, a bedroom, a
work-out space, a disco room, a picnic place, a chill-out room, a catwalk,
a party place, an office space, a quarrel room, a lets make love here as
the kids have fallen asleep in our bedroom, a docking station, a waiting
room, an observation post, a childrens restaurant, a recycling space, a
black hole into which everything disappears (Sjberg 2014, 197)
What characterizes the home is its fantastic potential for multi-tasking, combining spaces, objects, affects and activities, which are all put to work in very
flexible and sometimes surprising ways. Going through the Facebook material, as well as an extensive survey of life at home in seven nations, I am struck
by the way the home works not only as a web of routines and habits, but also
as a site of constant improvisation and experimenting. A tube of face cream
is turned into a doorstop, the bidet becomes a storage space for shampoos,
an ironing board is used as a mobile laptop work space. Such entanglements
transform both objects, activities, and affects.
Multitasking constitutes a special form of entanglement, in which different
activities are combined and sometimes merge into a single activity. A simple
example is the ways many domestic activities are combined with listening to
music: vacuuming with headphones on or a playing a favourite cd transforms
kitchen tasks. We can follow how new media, from the radio in the 1920s to
smartphones in the early 2000s, work as mood setters or add new dimensions
to traditional tasks, as people learned to listen to the radio while having morning coffee and reading the newspaper, ironing in front of the TV set, or texting
on the sofa while talking to the rest of the family. In this entanglement, both
the media and the work routines at home change (see, for example, Church et
al. 2010).
In order to understand the entanglements of activities or routines, the development of practice theory over the last years is helpful, as has been shown,
for example, in the book The Dynamics of Social Practices: Everyday Life and How
it Changes. Here, the authors discuss some of the mechanisms of multitasking
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homes but single households as well; it is about all that makes a home different
from a lodging or a hotel).
It is a moral economy that produces many tensions, for example between
individual aspirations and activities and the family or household good. Often there is a diffuse we hovering in the background. Do we really need a
new TV, a bigger house, dessert for dinner? The home is a site of negotiation,
with constant wheeling and dealing, trying to make different priorities and
interests cohabit. The author Jenny Diski describes breaking up a relationship
and reclaiming her home:
It is almost as a dance, a floating self that breathes its way around the
place while you only seem to brush your teeth and make cups of tea. It
is a celebration of solitudebut also of control, no need to synchronize.
(Diski 1999, 213)
The moral economy of the home also reflects different positions, and thus engages questions of class, gender, and generation. In some ways, the role of the
home as a moral economy is becoming an increasingly important issue. There
are more negotiations of what is expected of household members, of what is
fair or not, which is linked to the processes of increasing individualization in
modern homes, with a greater emphasis on my room, my taste, my priorities,
and my privacy among both children and adults. The moral economy of a
given home is rarely visible in grand declarations about rules, rights and duties; it is hidden in mundane situations, which explains why seemingly trivial
objects, routines, or actions can suddenly result in a flare of affect, and power
structures and hierarchies can be reinforced or challenged.
An illuminating study of such a strongly charged situation is Rick Wilks
analysis of family meals. In the throwntogetherness at the dinner table we find
not only the materiality of food and eating utensils but also different tastes,
family habits and traditions, and ideas of good or bad manners. He shows
how the table setting turns into a moral battleground where hierarchies are
established or challenged and questions of class, gender, and generation hide
under the cover of meal routines and are seldom made conscious (Wilk 2010).
For children in divorced families who move between Dads and Mums
new homes, such hidden agendas may become more visible as they learn
about the small but important shifts in moral economies, manifested not only
in the table manners but also in, for example, the sleeping arrangements and
cleaning chores (Winther 2015).
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Conclusion
The cost of bringing the Absolute into the kitchen is to soil it. The pretensions of Good Design require us to bring the noblest concepts of the
humanistic tradition into direct confrontation with scrambled egg and
soiled nappies The big white abstractions must be devalued, ultimately, by these associations with dirt and muck and domestic grottitude. (Banham 1970, 100)
There are different ways of attacking the question of throwntogetherness. Banhams perspective of domestic grottitude, the persistent grottiness or mess
of life at home, is one of them and reminds us that a basic domestic activity is
to transform a steady stream of beautiful objects, well-designed clothes and
furniture, new tools and fresh food items into something else: clutter, disorder,
stuff, waste. The home is a workshop where raw materials, raw feelings, previously untried movements, and new reflexes are welded into everyday patterns. The concepts of throwntogetherness, assemblage, and entanglement are
helpful in understanding such transformations and co-dependencies.
I started out talking about everyday life as a machinery. It is not a metaphor that should be carried too far, but I was struck by a classic definition
from 1876: a machine is a combination of resistant bodies so arranged that
by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work
accompanied by certain determinant motions (quoted in Mumford 1934, 9).
Such a statement reminds us that domestic throwntogetherness is not only about
integration and confederacy, but also about resistance, uneasy cohabitation,
and conflicting aims and interests.
My examples also illustrate different forms of throwntogetherness. One concerns the ways in which people simultaneously live in both the past, the present, and the future. The future is always present in the everyday dreaming,
scheming, and planning for a better home. There is often the feeling of being
on the road: Just wait until we have redecorated the living room or fixed the
bathroom The home is crowded with half-finished projects, half-hearted
attempts at reform, passing whims, and fancies. There are recipes saved that
will never be tried out, new household gadgets collecting dust on the top shelf,
exciting exotic ingredients never opened, boxes of puzzles with missing pieces.
All such plans, half-finished projects, or nostalgic longings shuttle the home
back and forth between the past and the future. Feelings also move in time; a
past history may be suddenly evoked, transporting an old conflict or a happy
memory right into the present, while worries colonize the future.
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There is also the throwntogetherness of the stable and the fleeting, the mix of
steady routines and stable traditions with constant improvisations and experimenting; routines that appear as given reflexessame procedure as yesterdaybut often hiding small and gradual dislocations.
In a similar manner, the tension of private and public is not a simple polarity but an interdependent field. The home is definitely not a life boxed in
between four walls, protected by heavy doors and drawn curtains. The home
is a site in which the outside world is always present and dealt with.
But what about the black box? The problem with the domestic everyday is
that it seems so well-known that it is turned into something that is taken for
granted and thus rendered invisible. There are, however, moments of alienation when the home is seen, maybe only briefly, in a new and destabilizing
light. What kind of strange machinery or setting is this? A home interior can
be charged with very different affects, triggering reactions of bliss, disgust,
longing or boredom. A feeling of reassuring security may be transformed into
claustrophobia. The one and same space is recharged. The living room or the
kitchen can be changed into a junk space (Koolhaas 2003). Suddenly, like its
inhabitants, it just looks tired and worn, out of fashion, out of place or out of
control:
Clarissa is filled, suddenly, with a sense of dislocation. This is not her
kitchen at all. This is the kitchen of an acquaintance, pretty enough but
not her taste, full of foreign smells. She lives elsewhere.
Clarissa, one of the characters in Michael Cunninghams novel The Hours,
stands in her kitchen observing all her stuff like a tourist in a museum:
She and Sally bought all these things, she can remember every transaction, but she feels now that they are arbitrary, the spigot and the counter
and the pots, the white dishes. They are only choices, one thing and then
another, yes or no, and she sees how easily she could slip out of this
lifethese empty and arbitrary comforts. (Cunningham 2003, 91-92)
In a flash the project of home is reduced to something alien, arbitrary, hollow.
A well-known kitchen turns into a mysterious black box. How did this random
collection of stuff, memories, feelings, and actions actually come about?
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